


the art of scraping through

by virtueoso



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: (except it's more like Indifferent to Friends to Lovers), Alternate Universe, Childhood Sweethearts, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-08-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:26:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25289032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virtueoso/pseuds/virtueoso
Summary: Scott Moir is a disgraced film star who spends more time in the gossip columns of Toronto’s society blogs than on movie sets. Tessa Virtue juggles studying for her undergrad with teaching ballet to five-year-olds, after a career-ending injury dashed her future with the National Ballet of Canada. Once childhood sweethearts, the two haven’t spoken in years, until an ultimatum from Scott’s publicist changes everything.He’s on his last chance — could she be it?
Relationships: Scott Moir & Tessa Virtue, Scott Moir/Tessa Virtue
Comments: 103
Kudos: 180





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This idea fell into my lap pretty much fully-formed while I was planning the sequel to one of my other fics, The Long Way Round. I initially put it to one side to focus on other projects, but after reading Echoesofstardust's stellar fake dating AU, [ Paper Rings](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23786773), I was inspired to get back to work on my own. 
> 
> Thanks to Boo, who was my sounding board and guiding star for so much of this fic.
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

To say that Scott Moir is having a bad day would be an understatement.

Scott Moir is having the kind of day that makes him wish he’d never gotten out of bed in the first place. The kind of day where he considers that following his aunt's advice and sticking to figure skating might actually have been the best course of action for him, rather than running away to Toronto with a high school diploma, no formal acting training and a few hundred dollars in his bank account.

Being kicked out of The Luxe at three a.m. for “inciting public disobedience”, when really all he did was suggest that it might be a fun idea to climb the sound rig either side of the packed stage would have been bad enough.

It was hardly his fault that Patrick fell off and had to be taken to the ER. In hindsight, he _can_ admit that it was his fault for trying to take him on the back of a rental scooter, only to crash into a lamppost five feet down the road.

He should have seen that one coming.

“I don’t know what to do with you any more. Honestly, I don’t. I am at the end of all my solutions, Scott. You seem to be hell bent on making sure that your career never recovers from last year. Or is making bargain-bin movies that never see the light of day really the direction that you want to go in? Because if so, by all means _please_ do let me know.”

The only person possibly having an even worse day than Scott Moir is Marie-France Dubreuil. In the twelve months since Marie-France was brought on to help dig Scott’s image and career out of the gossip rags of Toronto, he imagines that she’s had her share of tough days.

There was the morning after he was photographed falling out of the most notorious club in the city, three days after getting back from a detox retreat. Twitter had a field day with that one, the single, blurry photo of him waving cheerfully at reporters with two open bottles of wine in hand tweeted and retweeted more times than Scott cares to remember. Marie had been kept busy for weeks dealing with the fallout.

Then there was his disastrous appearance on CTV’s _Up Late with Levi_ , an attempt at image rehabilitation turned horribly wrong. Scott takes full blame for that particular shitstorm, but the host was a complete asshole, a smarmy git with bleached-white teeth and an ego so big it could be seen from orbit. Once he started making insinuations about one of Scott’s exes, it was all downhill from there. The invitations to talk shows had been few and far to begin with, Scott hardly having much worth promoting. He gets precisely zero now.

His short-lived engagement to his ex-girlfriend, a trust fund heiress named Cassandra, had made headlines — more so for the acrimonious and very public break-up a few days later than for the whirlwind romance that came before.

But judging by the tone of Marie-France’s voice as she paces back and forth the length of the office, gesturing emphatically with her hands, this whole comedy of errors is his worst yet. He regrets last night, if only for Marie’s sake.

“You’re lucky the club isn’t suing for loss of earnings. Or Patrick, for that matter. Do you think a broken arm will make it easier for him to find work? How is he supposed to play guitar if he cannot even move his fingers, Scott? Did you consider that when you were encouraging him to climb stage rigging?”

He opens his mouth to reply — catches the eye of Patrice Lauzon, his agent, who stares at him from across the room with his arms folded across his chest, gives an almost imperceptible shake of his head — and promptly closes it again.

“I am trying to understand what on earth possessed you to put him on the back of a rental scooter, the two of you both _clearly_ heavily intoxicated, and attempt to drive him down a busy main road. Why did you not just call a taxi? Call Patrice, call me? You could have very easily been arrested, do you understand that? It’s a blessing you hit the lamppost before you could do anyone else any harm.” Marie-France shakes her head, giving a little shudder like he’s a bad dream she’s trying to cast off. “ _Merde_ , Scott.”

In his defence, any normal person would have been given a slap on the wrist and told to stay away from the electric scooters next time they drink a little too much. But the press follow him around like vultures circling a dying animal these days. He’s not a person to them — he’s good money, a headline that will sell their shitty papers.

 _Jesus_ , his head hurts. 

He slinks down a little lower in his chair, tries to bring his hand up to subtly massage his temples.

“I have tried,” Marie says. “You cannot say I have not tried. But if you will not even meet me halfway, then there is only so much I can do for you. I will not waste my time or your money on impossibilities.”

“Tell me what you want me to do, Marie,” he mumbles, wearily. “Just say it and I’ll do it.”

She spins on her heel to face him, her eyes bright with frustration. “ _That_ is the problem, you see?! Every time, the same routine. Every time, you ask me to fix things. Next week it will be a new club or a new woman, and you will be worse off than where we started.”

“Marie. Come on. Please.”

“Do you know that you and I and Patrice, the three of us — that we have become a laughing stock? They call us too stupid to let you go. They call you worse.”

The part that stings is the fact that he knows he’s dragging them both down with him. Some days he thinks he’d be content to fade into sad notoriety if it wasn’t for the fact that Marie-France and Patrice’s careers are inextricably linked with his. He owes everything to Patrice. Five years ago, coming off a string of rejections and survival temp jobs, contemplating packing it all in and moving back home to Ilderton, Patrice had been the one to pick him up off the floor — the guy who saw something in him that nobody else could, or was willing to. 

He and his wife are good people, some of the few that Scott has left now. They don’t deserve to be repaid like this.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I never wanted you both to get dragged into this, believe me, if I could—”

Marie-France shakes her head. “Your apologies are no use to me.”

“Then tell me what is and I’ll do it. Whatever you want. I promise.”

“I need change, Scott,” she says, and then raises an eyebrow before he can say anything. “Real change. One that lasts.”

Not the superficial, three-day stints at his parents’ place in Ilderton to “recuperate”, she means. Or the handful of hobbies he’s thrown himself into in an attempt to keep busy enough to ignore the endless texts from friends asking why he’s not shown his face on the scene in weeks. 

Marie-France looks at him, her cool gaze cutting through the layers of bullshit that he surrounds himself with at any given moment in time, and he knows she means it.

This is the last chance he gets before he loses them too. Just like he’s lost everyone else who ever knew him for who he was before all this.

He looks straight back at her, calm and clear. 

“I’ll do it,” he says, and he watches her lips tighten in acknowledgement, a small nod. “Tell me what you need me to do.”  
  


* * *

  
The Thursday of the third week in October is like any typical term-time Thursday for Tessa: frantic, distracted, and full of the nagging sense that everybody else is working with twice the number of hours in the day as she is. Her days are busy at the best of times, but her Developmental Psychology seminar earlier that morning had overrun, and the subway had been its usual disaster trying to get back home for lunch. By the time she’s crammed a sorry-looking ham sandwich into her mouth and grabbed her ballet bag from the hall, apologising profusely to her Ragdoll cat, Seamus, who winds around her feet, meowing loudly, she’s already way behind schedule.

She’s in such a hurry to get out of the door that she almost misses the small, square package left on her doormat. Until she trips over it.

“Shit—”

It’s not unusual for the postmen to leave things at her front door; her postbox in the foyer downstairs has been broken for weeks despite numerous calls to the rental management company. Sometimes they even leave them with her elderly neighbour, Jeanette, a lovely woman of about sixty-five, who would be even lovelier if she didn’t have a habit of interrogating Tessa about every package she receives.

But she doesn’t remember ordering anything, and as she bends down and picks it up to inspect it more closely, the handwriting on the top of the package is unfamiliar to her. She can’t recall the last time she got a handwritten anything, except for maybe a few birthday cards here and there. Has her sister been ordering random cat toys off Etsy for Seamus again? Jordan’s been doing that a lot lately, and Tessa hasn’t said anything because she _knows_ her sister is still mourning the loss of her boyfriend’s cat (and her boyfriend, but mostly the cat) after an abrupt break-up. But she’s going to have to start drawing a line if this continues. There’s only so much space in her apartment.

Her phone buzzes in her jacket pocket, and she stashes the package quickly away in her kit bag. Whatever it is, she’ll deal with it later. For now, she has a class of precocious five-year-olds that will not wait for her to show them how to point their crooked feet and stand up straight.

Apart from the unpleasant sprint across the neighbourhood to make it to the dance studio in time, it’s a remarkably uneventful hour of class. She likes dealing with the young kids, fresh-faced and full of enthusiasm, before they’ve even begun worrying about ballet scholarships or graded examinations. The biggest concern for her five-year-olds is whether they can point their toes higher than their classmate next to them, and whether Tessa will let them dance to the Frozen soundtrack for their end-of-term recital (spoiler alert: she will not.)

As much stress as it can be sometimes, herding her class of fifteen towards something loosely resembling good balletic form, she enjoys the escape. In the studio, she can forget her concerns about coming up with a good proposal for her third-year research project, or whether her faculty advisor will let her take an extra credit class this year. By the time her class ends, and she’s packing away her things at the front of the studio, she’s completely forgotten about her worries from earlier.

“Tess?”

Poking her head around the door that leads through to the changing rooms and the back office of the studio is Tessa’s mentor, lifelong friend, and now boss, Suzanne. The warm lines of her face are softened by dark blonde hair that curls past her ears, stray tendrils that have escaped from the ponytail she normally pulls her hair back into. A lot of the people who meet Suzanne make the assumption that the sweetness of her exterior reflects a push-over, who happened to get lucky that one of her students ended up a Principal with the National Ballet.

That would be their mistake.

“How was it?” Suzanne says, coming across to perch on one of the plastic chairs set out for the parents at the side of the room. “Parents still causing more trouble than their children?”

Tessa shakes her head with a small smile. “Fine, actually. Not even a peep from them today. It probably helped that Kayla’s grandpa showed up rather than her mom.”

“Ah, the one with the...?” Suzanne mimes wild tufts of hair sprouting from her ears, looking pleased when Tessa nods. “Oh, yes, he’s much nicer than the mother. Hm. Good. Well, I’m glad you had a peaceful session for once. If you’re ever after some more of that peace and quiet, you know you’re always welcome to teach one of my advanced classes. The girls would jump at the chance to have you.”

“I really do appreciate that, Suze, but I’m happy teaching the kids. Honestly.” 

Packing away the last of her things into her overstuffed kit bag, she straightens up to meet Suzanne’s fond, if slightly exasperated gaze.

Tessa knows that Suzanne doesn’t understand why she chooses to stick with the kids’ classes. After a decade with the National Ballet, two years of those as a Principal, Tessa could have her pick of any teaching gig she wanted. She could do away entirely with tearful toddler meltdowns and overbearing parents sitting in on every session. 

But Suzanne also understands that Tessa has her reasons, and she’s never pried. Tessa appreciates that about her.

“Well, I better be going,” Tessa says. “I’ll see you on Saturday if you’re around.”

She shoulders her kit bag, but she must have forgotten to do up a zipper all the way, because there’s a rattling sound as something tumbles to the floor.

“Oh, here, wait—” 

Suzanne reaches down to pick it up, and Tessa realises a start that it’s the parcel that she’d forgotten all about, small and square, handwritten address taped to the top. Suzanne turns it over quickly in her hands, giving Tessa a curious look.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” Tessa says, with a shrug. “It was on my doorstep when I left after lunch. Jord says it’s not from her or mom, I texted to check.”

Suzanne’s eyes go wide. “And you haven’t opened it yet? What? _Tessa_. Go on—” she pushes the package into Tessa’s hands, stepping back and clasping her hands around her folded arms with a smile on her face. “I insist. Mysterious packages must always be opened with good company.”

Tessa rolls her eyes. “It’s probably just junk mail. Free samples or a wrong address. Don’t get your hopes up.”

“Mh-hmm.”

Suzanne’s still smiling as Tessa reluctantly sets down her kit bag and takes the package in both hands. There’s no exterior packaging: it’s just a small cardboard box, well taped on all sides. Tessa slips her fingernail under the edge of one corner and lifts open the flap, feeling a little tentative despite herself. 

She’s going to feel like an idiot when it turns out to be her aunt sending her birthday present three months late again.

But inside is a white envelope, with her name written in the same strange handwriting as the address label. Underneath, nestled against the bottom of the box, is something bound in layers of bubble-wrap. She frowns.

“What is it?” Suzanne says.

“I'm not sure,” Tessa says, pulling out the bubble-wrapped item and handing it to Suzanne. “Here, would you mind?”

The more she looks at the handwriting on the envelope, the messy scrawl of the vowels and the giant swoop of the “T”, the end flicked up like a ski ramp, the more she feels like there’s something familiar about it. The double “s” letters that nearly run into each other, crammed for space against the giant capital “T”; the tense grip of the pen that’s blotched ink at the very end of her name.

More than familiar.

Something important.

Her hands tremble a little as she opens the envelope, pulling out a sheaf of letter paper; she counts three whole pages, handwritten. Her eyes fall upon the first line of the letter, heart thudding in her chest.

 _Dear Tessa_ , she reads.

Underneath: _Tess_.

Then: _T._

“What’s this funny little thing?” Suzanne says, almost under her breath, and Tessa doesn’t need to look up to know, all of a sudden, what Suzanne will have in her hands, unearthed from its layers and layers of bubble wrap.

A small, fine silver chain, links coiled like a metal snake in her palm. Clasp at the back worn with use — or maybe not, maybe it’s as fresh as the day Tessa gave it to him, along with the promise of her friendship for as long as they lived. A charm at the bottom of the chain: a smooth disc of silver with her initial stamped into it.

She knows because she used to wear the matching half around her neck, day in day out, nestled against the warmth of her skin until the summer she turned fourteen.

Scott.  
  


* * *

  
“ _Good people doing good things do not make the headlines, Scott.”_

In the days since Marie-France delivered her grand plan for how they’re going to return Scott’s name to glory (or at the very least, decency), Scott has had a lot of time to think. He spent three full days deliberating whether it was the right call, another five trying to draft his letter to Tessa. Six more before he’d plucked up the courage to send it. Seven long, tortuous days after that, during which he’s heard absolutely nothing in response.

Not that he expected to. He hasn’t seen Tessa in years, hasn’t spoken to her in longer. This whole endeavour is a complete stab in the dark. 

God, he hopes Marie-France is right about all of this. 

Safe to say his expectations are at rock-bottom as he pushes open the door of the coffee shop, greeting the owner at the till with a small nod and a wave.

_If you’re still reading this, that means you haven’t thrown this letter away in disgust, so I guess I’m doing okay. On second thought, maybe you threw it away and are now picking it back up again. Whatever. Either way, you’re still reading. I think._

He takes up a seat at a small table in the back corner of the shop. It’s not a place he was familiar with before this week — he doesn’t often venture downtown during the day, but not knowing Tessa’s situation in Toronto, he’d wanted somewhere that was easily accessible. He’d scoped the place out earlier, determined that the back corner would give him a decent view of the door and any new arrivals, while staying far enough back that Tessa could plausibly choose to see him, turn around and leave. He hopes she stays. Coffee shops aren’t really his scene, but he’s got it on good recommendation that this one does an excellent vanilla latte.

He also hopes Tessa drinks coffee. That seems like something he should remember about her, but all he can think about when he casts his mind back to the hazy days of his childhood, tries to picture the girl he knew when he was nine years old, racing around the crappy small-town rink by his parents’ place, is her shy smile and her huge belly laugh, the one that always seemed to take her by surprise as much as it did him. The girl he remembers at eleven was bright as quicksilver, going places further and faster that he could ever dream of. And the girl he remembers at sixteen...

Well. That was something else entirely.

He pulls his denim jacket tighter around him, fiddles with the cuffs, doesn’t even touch the flat white he ordered, more out of courtesy than anything else.

_I know it’s a lot to take in. I thought it was a crazy idea when my publicist pitched it to me. Hell, I still think it’s a crazy idea. But if you’re even a little bit curious, meet me on the corner of Dundas and St Patrick at 12pm on Saturday 17th October. There’s a coffee shop there called Quilliam’s. I’ll be there for an hour. Come yell at me, come throw things at me. I don’t know. Come ask me questions._

_If nothing else, it’d be good to hear your voice again. No strings attached._

_Hope to see you soon._

_S._

Scott tries not to watch the clock as it gets closer and closer to noon, but it’s impossible. Every time somebody new walks in, the small bell on the front door jangles merrily, and he jumps a mile. He attempts to distract himself by doodling on the napkin that came with his coffee, drawing little stick figure ballerinas in the patterned edges.

He’s not hoping that she’ll agree to his frankly insane scheme — even accounting for the favour that she owes him from all those years ago. But there’s a little part of him that hopes she walks in anyway. He might not ever see her again, and she’ll probably leave after today hating him just as much as she did before, but selfishly, he’d like to see her. To see what she looks like now, to hear her voice. He wonders whether she still does that thing she used to do with her vowels, drawing them out so primly because her friends at the National Ballet School told her it would make her sound older. She used to have such a funny way of saying his name. He never told her, because he was sixteen at the time, and the idea of talking about his feelings to anybody, least of all Tessa, was mortifying, but he liked it.

“Scott?”

Yeah, that was kind of how she used to say it. With the little uptilt at the end, like she was never quite sure she was doing it right.

“Scott.”

Sometimes, during the skating lessons she used to attend with him around her ballet and extracurriculars and homework, he’d mess around on purpose just to see if he could get her to say his name again.

“Jesus, _Scott_.”

He glances up, startled by the sudden increase in volume, and—

Oh. 

The woman who stands before him, her brow creased gently in concern, one hand fastened around the strap of her shoulder bag, is unmistakably Tessa Virtue. Her face might be a little older than the last time he saw her, but under the stage lights and with performance makeup on, it would have been hard for him to tell from the theatre stalls.

He’d know her by her voice, anyway. Instantly.

“Am I interrupting something?” she says, glancing down at Scott’s napkin art.

He crumples it up swiftly and tucks it under his coffee mug. “No, no, sorry. Have a seat, please. Do you want a drink? The vanilla latte—”

“I’m good,” she says, sitting down and tucking her hands together in her lap. “Thank you.”

He’s staring at her, he realises. He’s staring, and he should say something, because he’s the one who asked her here, after all. And she’s _here_ , despite everything that he knows about her leading him to conclude that he wouldn’t have a hope in hell of her showing up.

But then, he supposes, he’s changed over the years since he knew her. Why shouldn’t she?

“It’s, um— wow,” he says, lifting a hand to scratch at the back of his neck, and then thinking the better of it. “Sorry. It’s great to see you. I’m surprised, I mean — I can’t really believe you showed up.”

She furrows her brow at him. “You sent me the necklace. I thought it was the least I could do to turn up and hear you out.”

“I know, but I didn’t expect you to — not that I didn’t think you wouldn’t honour the pact, or anything, but—”

He’s not explaining this very well at all. He knows he’s not, because she’s starting to look like she regrets turning up in the first place.

“Okay. Sorry, let me try this again.” 

“Please,” Tessa says, very politely.

He takes a small breath, thinks about all the things he had planned to say. The answers to the questions that he’d prepared for, how he was going to pitch the whole thing to her, Marie-France’s grand plan from start to finish.

“I’m really glad you came, Tess,” he says instead, without even thinking about it, so maybe it comes out with more truth than he’d intended. “I know it’s been ages, and you probably have a thousand things you want to say to me — and I know I’d deserve them. But I’m just… I’m really glad to see you.”

Her eyes go a little wide, catching the light of the afternoon sun as it filters in golden streaks through the coffee shop windows, and he’s reminded momentarily of the summer evenings with her in the passenger seat of his beat-up old truck, the way she would look with the windows down and the music blaring out of the stereo, sunlight streaking through her windswept hair like watercolour, turning the glitter of her green eyes to golden warmth.

Marie-France was right when she said this would be a whole lot more dangerous with someone that he already knew. 

“So, how have you been?” he says, quickly. “I talked to your mom a bit when I got your address for the letter, she said you’re studying now?”

Tessa nods, still looking uneasy but evidently relieved at a familiar subject. “Yeah, I am. Psych major at the University of Toronto. This semester is the start of my second year.”

“No way? That’s awesome! You were always so switched on with that stuff when we were kids, I knew you’d do great.”

“It’s nothing special, really…” Tessa shrugs. “I had to find something to do with my time after stopping ballet, otherwise I’d have driven myself insane. I had the grades, so I went for it.”

“Still, that’s amazing. It’s a hell of a lot more than I’ve been doing with my time.”

Her eyebrows raise slightly. “Yes, I’ve read.”

He feels his stomach drop a little.

Right.

Of course she has.

He’s never been particularly proud of his behaviour over the past few years, but for some reason, knowing that Tessa’s read those gossip columns, seen those tweets and those pictures makes him feel oddly ashamed. It’s a feeling he’s accustomed to with his family and friends, but not with a girl he’s barely spoken to in decades. Not with her.

He clears his throat, trying to push away the nagging sense of unease. “Right… so, uh, you know where I’m coming from with this. And believe me, I know how crazy it sounds. I’m not expecting anything, I mean, you don’t have to say yes or no. Or you can say no right now and call me an asshole, and that would be totally fine.”

“You were an asshole a decade ago,” she says, coolly. “All I know about you now is what I’ve read. Maybe you’re an asshole now too. It’s an asshole kind of thing to do, fake a PR relationship to get your name back in Hollywood’s good books.”

“I know. I appreciate that, I do.”

She looks him straight in the eye. “But you asked me anyway. You could have paid somebody to do this for half the trouble. Why me?”

He’s practiced this one, and a hundred answers spring to mind instantly, some more honest than others. He wants someone who knows him as he used to be, before the fame went to his head and his reputation to the gutter, wants someone who can call him on his shit when he’s being an asshole, who won’t sit there, meek as a mouse because he’s paying her to pretend to like him. He wants something real. He wants a person he can be real with. He wants to feel like there’s somebody left who thinks he’s something more than the shallow, self-destructing party boy that the media paints him into. He wants to convince her that he’s different. 

But all of his prepared answers melt away as he sits there, looking back at her. He’s known her for twenty years, and all of twenty minutes.

“I wanted to pick someone who could never fall in love with me,” he says, simply.

He chose the girl whose heart he broke when he was sixteen, and never saw again.

If she’s surprised, she doesn’t show it. The little muscles at her brow wrinkle and deepen for a moment, like he’s a logic puzzle that she can’t quite figure out — and then she nods, a slight movement.

“Alright,” she says. “I’ll do it.”

Scott blinks at her. “Wait, what? You will?”

“I don’t see the harm in trying. You said yourself that it’s impossible for me to feel anything for you. And anyway, you called in the pact. I keep my promises.”

He’s still trying to wrap his head around the fact that she’s given him anything but a scathing rejection, so the coldly dispassionate tone of her voice doesn’t hurt his pride as much as it might have otherwise done. 

But it does make him slow to react as she gets to her feet, her chair scraping back across the wooden floorboards. 

“Hey, hold on—”

Ignoring him, she shoulders her bag, pushing her hair back behind her ear. “As lovely as it’s been to reminisce about the time you broke my heart, I have a class to get to.”

“On a Saturday?”

“I teach ballet,” she says, raising an eyebrow at him like she dares him to say another word. “You might be a big deal, Moir, but so are my five year-olds.”

She teaches ballet to five-year-olds. Of course she does. She probably calls her mother every weekend and donates ten percent of her income to charity. It doesn’t even bear thinking about how much Marie-France is going to adore her.

“Text me the details for the meeting with your people next week, okay? I’m free on Tuesday and Friday. Please don’t call, and _don’t_ show up at my address. I don’t want to be staked out by paparazzi for the next six months.”

“Yeah, no, of course—”

Scooping up his pen, she leans down across the table to scrawl her phone number on his napkin. He expects her to straighten up again when she’s done, but she stays slightly hunched, her chin tilting up level with his.

“One chance, Scott,” she says, quietly. “That’s what my side of the pact gets you. One chance, and we’re done, and I owe you nothing. Nothing more.”

Her eyes on him are serious and still, and he swallows, nodding slowly.

Almost two decades ago, aged nine and eleven, they might not have realised what they were doing when, on the day before Tessa left to join the National Ballet School for good, they swapped friendship necklaces and a childish promise to fulfil one unspecified favour that the other might request of them.

He imagines it’s the kind of promise that kids make every day, with all the best intentions in the world, and forget within a week. If he hadn’t held onto that necklace so tight, worn it around his neck day and night until his mother had to replace the clasp on the back, maybe he would have forgotten too. Maybe Tessa wouldn’t be the part of his life that she is now. She’d just be the little kid that he skated with for a few years before they both moved on to bigger things, and he’d never have a reason to think of her again.

But he came at her call once, that summer of sixteen. Now she’s come for his. 

When Tessa Virtue walks out of his life once more, he’s left with a phone number scrawled beside little ballerina doodles on a napkin, a stone cold latte, and the sinking feeling that he might have just let himself in for far more than he planned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! Please do let me know your thoughts, either in the comments below or [@virtueoso](http://virtueoso.tumblr.com/ask) on Tumblr or [@virtueosos](http://twitter.com/virtueosos) on Twitter. I'd love to hear from you. Keep well, and I'll see you in the next chapter!


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the lovely response to the first chapter! This fic is very much uncharted territory for me, but I'm enjoying every second of writing it.

“I’m sorry, you did _what?!”_

Tessa winces, fumbling to turn the volume on her phone down a few notches as her sister’s voice explodes into her ear. The general noise of downtown Toronto may be loud — a steady blare of car horns and the chatter of passers-by, pierced every so often by police sirens — but Jordan is louder. Far louder.

“It’s really not that big of a deal, Jordan. You’re making it sound like I agreed to elope to Vegas with him or something. It’s just a few press events. I turn up, smile, stand next to him for photographs. Celebrities do it all the time for publicity.”

“Yeah, _celebrities_ do it all the time, Tess. I thought you were done with all that — with him.”

“I was,” Tessa says, ducking around a slow-moving couple on the sidewalk. “I am.”

Jordan makes a noise of disbelief. “Sure sounds like it.”

“Look, you’re the one who’s always telling me to get out there and enjoy my freedom. At worst, he turns out to be as insufferable as he seems in the press, and I walk within the first week. At best…”

She hesitates, because, truth be told, she doesn’t know what the best case scenario is in this situation. At best, she upholds her end of the pact, attends the handful of events necessary to convince the press that she and Scott are in a committed relationship, and then what? Disappears into the sunset? 

That’s a problem for his team to figure out, she supposes. Her side of the bargain will be fulfilled.

“Is he paying you?” Jordan demands.

“No! God, of course not.”

“Then I really can’t understand what you’re getting from this, Tess. I’m sorry, I know you have that necklace and your pact and everything, but the guy treated you like _dirt_. Do you need me to remind you how many times you called me in tears because of him? How you almost didn’t come back home that Christmas because you were worried you might run into him around town? I want you to be happy. I want you to be able to do all the things you couldn’t when your life was ballet and nothing else, but…” Jordan sighs. “Scott Moir? I mean, come on, Tess. Really?”

“Fourteen was a long time ago,” she says, defensively. 

She was a lot of things at fourteen. 

Hopelessly naive and a helpless romantic. Thin-skinned and vulnerable, hadn’t yet learned to pull her hunger around herself like a suit of armour, to weaponise that single-minded drive to be better than anyone and everyone else. At fourteen, she felt every rejection like it was the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

“And I know—” she continues, as Jordan begins to protest. “I know that doesn’t excuse him. I’m not going into this blind, Jordan. Neither is he. He knows he was a shitty person back then.”

“He better.”

“But I owe it to him to give him a chance.”

The cell reception is terrible near Tessa’s place, and she hears the familiar crackling of static across the line as she draws up to her apartment building, letting herself in and closing the door firmly behind her.

Her sister gives a soft huff of laughter, sounding resigned. “You’re so much nicer than he deserves, Tess.”

A small smile finds its way onto Tessa’s face. “And _you’re_ biased. But thank you. I’ll be sensible, I promise.”

“Alright. Love you, twinkletoes.”

“Love you too,” she says. “I’ll see you Sunday, okay? We’re still on for lunch?”

“Wouldn’t miss it.”

“Bye,” she says softly.

Jordan’s words ring in her ears as she makes her way up to her apartment, legs burning a little by the time she gets to the top and lets herself in. Seamus trots across to greet her, meowing loudly, and she scoops him up, scratching under his chin as she wanders through to the kitchen and opens the fridge, trying to assess whether she has a reasonable excuse to skip on cooking tonight and just order delivery.

Maybe it’s a crazy thing to do, to keep a promise she made over a decade ago. Maybe somebody else would have thrown Scott’s letter in the trash without a second thought. Who is he to her but a guy she knew briefly when she was younger, and who turned out to be as disappointing as most of the men she’s met in her life? She barely remembers what it felt like to be in love with him — if she can even call the brief infatuation of a fourteen-year-old anything close to love.

She knew him for the blink of an eye, loved him and lost him in a single summer. She knows she doesn’t owe him anything. Not really. 

But there’s a part of her that wants to believe in the childhood faith of her youth, that clings to the ridiculous notion that necklaces and a few words exchanged without a care in the world, that they can still mean something. She never had much of a childhood beyond the strict regimen of the ballet school, an existence of restriction and single-minded devotion where nothing but perfection was anything close to acceptable. If all goes horribly wrong, she’ll chalk this particular series of events up as the mistake she never got to make as a kid.

Perhaps she could do with a few more of those.  
  


* * *

  
Scott had known from the very first instant he laid eyes on Tessa again that Marie-France was going to be beside herself. The Tessa Virtue he’d known at fourteen had been pretty, well-spoken, a sweet-natured kid. She’d been a little shy around people she wasn’t familiar with, and she had a habit of trailing off at the end of her sentences, like she wasn’t sure whether what she had to say was worth anybody hearing.

Tessa Virtue, aged twenty-six, one career behind her already and working on the second, is a force to be reckoned with. 

She has all the grace and poise that one would expect from a trained ballerina, moving with almost preternatural fluidity. Her manner is clear and direct, and when she looks into Scott’s eyes — as she does every so often, mostly with a slightly concerned frown — he gets the sense that she’s seeing far more than she lets on.

It also helps that she’s stunning. Like, _seriously_. He doesn’t realise it until about halfway through their introductory meeting with Marie-France and Patrice, because Tessa’s beauty isn’t an in-your-face, drop-dead kind of thing. It’s the sort of beauty that sneaks up on you, a slow, dawning realisation that’ll leave you mulling it over for days, until it hits you slap-bang in the middle of a conversation about which event would be good for the two of you to attend as a test run, and how Tessa’s schedule for the next few months matches up with yours, and you realise that you haven’t said a single word in the last ten minutes because you’re too busy sneaking glances at the girl in the chair next to you.

As soon as Scott realises, he stops doing it.

He won’t make it weird. Tessa being crazy gorgeous is a strategic advantage in their fake relationship.

There’s nothing in the least bit weird about that.

Over the course of the hour or so that Tessa spends at the office, they come up with a set of ground rules for their arrangement going forwards. It turns out that Tessa _really_ likes rules, which shouldn’t surprise him given her regimented career choice. But it does make him laugh a little bit when she pulls out a notepad and starts taking down notes — until she shoots him a look, and he grabs a pen and paper as well.

Rule one is that Tessa has a non-negotiable out, at any time and under any circumstances.

Rule two is that their fake relationship will never infringe on the real things that are important to her: namely her school, her ballet teaching, and her time with her family. 

Rules three through seven cover the various situations in which Scott is allowed to call her and/or show up at her place, which essentially boil down to never, except for life-or-death circumstances, or to feed her cat in emergencies.

Rule eight is… sensitive. The entire scheme will live or die on them being able to fool most of Toronto into thinking that they’re madly in love with each other. It hasn’t passed Scott by that this will require a certain level of physical intimacy — even if all they need to do is stand next to one another on the red carpet and look like they can vaguely tolerate one another’s presence while they pose for photos. Marie-France is still keen they come up with written boundaries. 

“How is above the hips for Scott, hm?” she prompts, after a few tentative moments of silence. “Arm around his waist only? We could get away with shoulders, perhaps, but it would be difficult.”

“Waist is fine,” Tessa says, nodding. “For me too.”

Scott nods quickly at the eyebrow Marie raises at him, clearing his throat. “Yeah. Yup. All good.”

“And kissing, yes, no? I know you two are familiar with one another—”

“That’s, uh — _familiar_ is a big word, Marie,” Scott says, resolutely not looking to Tessa’s side of the table. “We messed around a bit as kids. It wasn’t anything wild, I mean…”

Marie-France gives them both a bright smile. “Excellent, so there will be no awkwardness this time. Tessa, I am sure you have kissed your scene partners on stage, no? Can you picture Scott as the Romeo to your Juliet?”

Tessa shrugs. “I don’t see why not.”

Scott glances across to her in alarm. 

“Will that be a problem, Scott?” Marie-France says.

“No, not at all, I, um—”

There’s really no polite way to say he expected Tessa to be more of a prude than she is. So he shuts up.

There are a few other rules they go through, mainly around logistics and Tessa keeping the details of their arrangement private, but Scott’s only half paying attention. He doesn’t know why it bothers him that Tessa is so blasé about this whole thing, that she seems totally unbothered at the thought of having to kiss him. 

Is it the fact that he last knew her when she was fourteen, sweet and shy, and she couldn’t even look him in the eyes when he kissed her? Maybe it’s the way she says it, like he could be anyone, meaningless — replace him with a brick wall and she’d use her imagination to make him into the Romeo she needed him to be. Was it his attempt at brushing off their previous romance that did it?

All he knows is that it bothers him in a way that few things bother him now. And he’s not entirely comfortable with the idea that Tessa Virtue has gotten under his skin in the space of a week.  
  


* * *

  
Memory is a curiously selective thing, because Tessa may not remember how it felt to be so in love with Scott that her heart could scarcely contain it all, or the sense of his loss that she once thought was world-ending.

But she remembers their awkward, fumbling sessions in the backseat of the car that he was barely old enough to drive. She remembers the slightly unpleasant pressure of his mouth on hers, the way he would breathe all funny against the side of her neck, palms a little sweaty under the hem of her t-shirt. She’d never kissed anyone before she’d kissed Scott. He was her first — a whole string of them that summer.

And she wonders, more out of scientific curiosity than anything else, whether he’s any better a kisser now than he was at sixteen.  
  


* * *

  
It takes a little while for Marie-France to put together a proper trial run for them. Tessa gathers that trying to get Scott an invitation to anything half reputable is a challenge in itself these days, never mind trying to find an event small enough or far enough out from Toronto that they won’t be swamped by paparazzi. 

In the meantime, they’ve been instructed to spend some time together. Technically, it’s for them to come up with the story of how they met and to discuss the fake future of their fake relationship, just in case they get any rogue questions, but Tessa knows that it may as well just be for the purpose of getting them comfortable with one another again. 

She knows a little about who they’ll be up against in this scheme, the kind of people they’ll be trying to win over. The National Ballet’s fundraising galas would attract a handful of them, the sort of people who had money and time to burn, and she would always make a point of steering clear of them as much as possible. Anything she said to those people would be twisted into a headline, circulated without any regard for the truth of the matter, like the bitter changing room rumours that used to circle in the ballet school. 

If Scott’s opponents are anything like hers used to be, she knows they’ll be vicious. She knows that she and Scott will have to be convincing. Which, as much as she may be hesitant to admit it, means they’ll actually have to get to know each other.

Scott has been a little distant since their meeting with Marie-France and Patrice, but he replies to her text suggesting that they go for lunch at a cafe near her lecture building with a little thumbs up emoji, a smiley face emoji and then three different emojis of a sandwich, a pie, and a cupcake. 

She’s coming to learn that Scott uses more emoji than anyone else she’s ever met, her eight-year old niece included. 

She shoots back a little star and a grinning face. And then, because she’s bored in her lecture, she spends five minutes scrolling through her phone keyboard to find a pair of ballet shoes, a notebook, and a film camera. 

He sends her another thumbs up, and she rolls her eyes and puts her phone away. 

Her lecture overruns as per usual — her Psych professors may be lovely, but they have a habit of swerving down twenty-minute unrelated tangents as Tessa watches her dreams of finishing on time slip through her fingers — and she’s breathless and red-cheeked by the time she pushes open the door to The Rook and Raven and steps inside, stamping the rainwater out of her sodden sneakers.

It didn’t take long for Tessa to find this place once starting her degree, and it took even less time for it to become one of her favourite spots in the whole city. The upper floor of the cafe, a small loft reached via a spiral staircase past the till, is given over entirely to tall bookshelves crammed with every size, sort and colour of book imaginable. A shoestring lending library operates out of the top floor every Saturday morning, but it’s mostly there for visitors to the cafe to peruse, and Tessa has spent many a happy hour among the stacks, tucked away with a coffee and a copy of a book she’d never heard of before plucking it off the shelves. She can forgive them their overpriced sandwiches for that.

Today, however, she swerves past the staircase, scanning the bottom floor. There’s the usual crowd in The Rook and Raven: small clusters of students sitting and talking quietly, some reading with their lunch, others scribbling down notes with earphones dangling from their collars or plugged into their ears. 

And then, sitting at a table at the furthest corner of the room, looking slightly uncomfortable amidst the student population is Scott. He brightens noticeably when he catches her eye from across the cafe, raising his hand to give her a small wave. 

“So sorry I’m late,” she sighs, dropping her bag to the floor with a heavy thud as she slips into the seat opposite him. “My professors don’t seem to understand the concept of a schedule. Or the concept of other people having personal time.”

He gives her a grin. “No worries. I got you a hot chocolate. No whipped cream, dark chocolate sprinkles, and I _think_ …” he squints a little bit. “A pinch of cinnamon? Am I right?”

She blinks. For a guy who presents to most of the world as an asshole, he really is disarmingly nice sometimes.

“Wow. Did you remember all that from my text, or did you cheat and look it up?”

They’ve been texting each other rapid-fire questions back and forth about their likes and dislikes, one of Tessa’s suggestions for ways to be a more convincing couple. The look on Scott’s face tells her everything she needs to know, and she gives a brief snort of laughter, pulling the mug across to her side of the table with a shake of her head. 

“It’s alright. You’re allowed a crib sheet for now. But you better be down to memory by the time we have to go anywhere.”

He raises an eyebrow at her. “You’re talking a big game for someone in the exact same position as me.”

“Wrong,” she says, levelling her spoon at him. “The difference is that I know all of it already.”

“Bull _shit_.”

“Try me.”

He leans back in his seat, folding his arms across his chest. “What’s my date of birth?”

“Easy. September 2nd, 1987. Born in Ilderton, Ontario, to Alma and Joe Moir. Brothers Charlie and Danny Moir, aunt Carol. You wanted to be a hockey player when you grew up, only you couldn’t skate to save your life, so your mom put you in figure skating classes, where you met me. We skated together until I was nine, when I left to join the National Ballet School. You decided skating was no fun without a partner, so you gave it up to focus on acting. You didn’t see me again until we reunited in Toronto, almost twenty years later at a mutual friend’s dinner party. I slipped you my number on a napkin, you called the next morning to invite me to dinner at your favourite restaurant in the city. I was thoroughly charmed over good conversation and eye-wateringly expensive sushi, and the rest is history. We’ve been sickeningly happy ever since. I love your roguish charm and your wicked sense of humour. You love my practicality and my ability to see the best in people. We make a perfect couple.” 

Scott’s eyes are wide, his mouth hanging open slightly. 

“Jesus…” he says, under his breath. 

Tessa takes a sip of her hot chocolate, shrugging. “You keep your crib sheet. I’m good to go when you are.”

“I can see that,” he mumbles. “Remind me why you’re here if you know everything about me and our relationship already?”

“You’re not the worst lunch company in the world,” she says, nonchalantly. “Plus, you buy me hot chocolate. There are tougher ways to spend an hour.”

It’s partly true.

The other part is that she’s still struggling to figure out how a guy like Scott, who used to give her piggybacks over the big puddles that formed in the parking lot of the Ilderton Arena, ends up one of the most notorious members of Toronto’s glitterati. Admittedly, she’s only known him again for the better part of three weeks, and said knowledge consists of three face-to-face meetings and a stream of back and forth text messages elaborating the fake details of their fake relationship. He seemed genuine enough when he told her his biggest fear is mascots (specifically the Ottawa Senators’ mascot, Spartacat — she wasn’t familiar, but a quick Google assured her that his fear was quite reasonable). She doesn’t know what reason he would have to lie about things like that.

But then, she also has to remind herself that this is a guy who would fake a romantic relationship with a girl he hasn’t spoken to for nearly twenty years, in order to restore his career to its former glory and live out the rest of his days in idolatry.

So really, she doesn’t know him at all.

“So, what’s our strategy?” she says breezily, setting her mug down on the table in front of her. 

Scott raises an eyebrow. “Our strategy?”

“How are we going to be convincing? These people have seen you fall out of clubs with all sorts of girls, right? How are we going to convince them that this time is different? That I’m different.”

“Well, you’re—” Scott gestures vaguely towards her, a move that doesn’t illuminate his point in the slightest. “You’re you.”

She gives him an unimpressed look. “Excellent contribution, thank you. That'll look great as a front page quote.”

“I don’t know, the most I figured was that we turn up, we’re photographed together, we don’t kill each other, job done. It’s really not that hard to get the press to assume that you’re dating. They do it with literally every single girl I come within five feet of.”

“Did you love any of your ex-girlfriends? Any of the girls you used to get photographed with?”

Scott glances warily up at her. “What kind of a question is that?”

“I’m trying to establish a baseline,” she says, shrugging. “I don’t really want to know any more about the details of your sordid love life than I have to. But if you have a genuine memory to pull from, it should be easier to fake being in love with me.”

He gives her a weird look, one that she can’t really place.

Sometimes she thinks she’ll know how he’s going to react — the lift of his smile at the end of a sentence will remind her of the scrappy grin he’d shoot her in the rink, right before he would race off to dunk ice shavings down the back of his brother’s shirt, or the way his ears flush pink at the tips when she laughs at him will send her back twenty years to when he couldn’t even hold her hand without blushing.

But more often than not, she feels hopelessly unsure — of herself and of him. She just hopes they can fake it better than these awkward, halting conversations would lead her to believe.

Scott stares down at his hands, flipping a palm over to pick at the skin around his fingernails. “Sure. I guess I loved all of them, in their own kinda way. You?”

It’s a laughable question, but she doesn’t laugh.

Her romantic relationships have been few and far between, a string of successive boyfriends after she graduated from the National Ballet School and earned her position in the corps de ballet, who quickly learned that there was no place in her heart they could occupy that would come before her work. There’s been no one since starting university either; the age gap is glaringly obvious between Tessa and her fellow students, and she tends to keep herself to herself on campus. She has no issues with it. If she felt there was something lacking in her life, she would take steps to fix the problem, but she’s happy with her one-bedroom apartment and her cat, Sunday lunch dates with her sister and her weekly calls to her mom. 

She doesn’t think any of that would make sense to Scott.

Has she loved any of them? She feels like love would last beyond the brief spark of their beginnings; love would stay with her long after they’d given up. True love would do that, no matter the length of time or the distance. 

So she shrugs, and takes another sip of her hot chocolate, her gaze skirting the edges of his discomfort. “I know how to pretend.”

Scott frowns. “What, you’ve never…?”

“No. Is that a problem?”

“Of course not,” he says, but he stares at her like that is. “I just thought… you know, we—”

She knows what he thought, and the assumption irks her more than anything. She folds her arms over her chest.

“We what?” she says, raising an eyebrow. “We were just a couple of kids messing around. That’s what you told Marie-France.”

He winces. “I didn’t mean it to sound like that.”

Tessa's expression tightens, and she sets her mug down on the table with a clink. “Let me be the one to set the record straight, then. That summer was an escape. You presented me with an out, and I took it, and I’m grateful to you for that. What I have _not_ done is spent the last twenty years sitting around dreaming of the moment of our reconciliation.”

“What? That’s not—”

“I don’t expect anything from you, Scott. I don’t want anything from you, and I don’t think you want anything from me either, not really. What’s best for the both of us is if you let me uphold my end of the bargain and nothing more. Then you can get back to the life you want to lead, and I can be on my way. Does that sound right?”

It’s harsher than she’s been with him, maybe anyone, in a long time, and she swallows the guilt that rises in her immediately at the look on his face, hurt blooming in the gentle hazel of his eyes as he stares at her. 

It’ll be better this way, if they can establish boundaries from the very beginning. They can joke around with each other, they can be friends, but at the end of the day, they both have a job to do. Getting overly involved will only hurt them in the long run. She wants to know enough about him that she can pretend to be in love with him; she doesn’t want to know so much that she’s re-evaluating the person she thought she knew at fourteen, who broke her heart without as much as a backwards glance.

None of which makes it easier to sit there, frosty silence settling across them, as Scott looks at her, then down at his hands, then out the window. Tessa tries drinking her hot chocolate, but the taste is bitter and chalky on her tongue, and she sets it down again after a few minutes. 

A giggling, curly-haired girl comes up, flanked by two friends, to shyly ask for Scott’s autograph, and he scribbles something quickly down on a page of her notepad, not making eye contact with Tessa. 

She doesn’t finish the hot chocolate, leaves it half full and tells Scott she has a lecture to get to. He doesn’t protest. It doesn’t hit her until days later, thinking over their conversation, that when he said he’d loved all his girlfriends, that probably included her, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The next chapter might be a little longer coming as I've got a few life commitments coming up, but I hope it'll be worth the wait. As ever, thank you for reading. Please feel free to drop me a comment below to let me know what you thought!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is brought to you by the hours I should have spent studying for my September exams. Please enjoy the fruits of my procrastination.

If Scott lived in an ideal world, so many things about the past few weeks would have gone differently.

In an ideal world, he would not have put his foot in it over a casual lunch with Tessa, and she would not have left him with her stone-cold hot chocolate and a growing feeling of regret.

In an ideal world, they would be deep into preparations for the first outing of their fake relationship, readying themselves for whatever event Marie-France had found — something small, away from the public eye. Some place where they can test out how watertight their story is, allowing for the high probability that everything goes to shit the moment they have to look at each other with any kind of love and longing.

In an ideal world, Scott would not be in this situation to begin with.

However, Scott’s world is far from ideal right now.

Tessa is barely replying to his texts, let alone expressing a desire to meet up and re-run the story that she has down perfectly already. And the only event that Marie-France, with all her years of experience, can swing them both an invite to is a two-day film festival at Niagara Falls.

Scott has never heard of it before, which is initially encouraging. The festival turns out to be in its third year, and clearly either not picky about who they put on their guest list or desperate, because Scott is given top billing on their promotional material almost immediately. All he has to do is show up, stand around, and say a few words at the opening and closing speeches. It’s one of the easier gigs he’s had over the past twelve months. But it’s in unfortunate proximity to Toronto, only an hour or so’s drive from the city, which leaves no doubt that Scott’s usual press entourage will be in attendance. It’s also a two-day event, requiring an overnight hotel stay in Niagara. Recent events with Tessa having proved that they struggle to hold a pleasant conversation for longer than twenty minutes, he’s more than a little apprehensive about the thought of two full days in one another’s back pockets. 

He expects her to blank him entirely when he texts with details of Marie-France’s proposal, explaining that he knows it’s a lot to ask, and he can always go back to Marie and see if they can delay for a little while until something better comes up, and if worst comes to worst they can just duck out early on the whole festival anyway, blow it off and drive back to Toronto. It’s not like they can damage his reputation any more than it already has been.

_Fine_ , she texts back a few hours later, followed by a thumbs up emoji.

She’s ignored him ever since. 

So there’s that.

Scott doesn’t do stage fright, not any more. He’s suffered through far too many toe-curlingly embarrassing auditions to be concerned about looking like an idiot. But the closer it gets to the day they’re due to be leaving for the film festival, the longer Tessa’s silence becomes, the more nervous he gets — and the stronger the temptation grows to do something insanely stupid like call her, which she told him never to do, or turn up at her front door with an apology bouquet and a box of chocolates (except she also told him never to turn up at her house, and sending a third party to do his bidding would only prove to her he’s precisely the entitled jerk she thinks he is).

He barely talks himself out of it the first time. Patrice talks him out of it the second. 

The third time comes on a Friday evening at his usual spot — a grungy, unremarkable bar a few back streets away from his apartment, where the owners let him sneak in the back door to slip the press. He’s a few beers deep, drunk-texting a handful of people on his contacts list, more out of sheer boredom than anything else, and his thumb passes over Tessa’s name when he goes to search through his contacts for someone else to annoy.

It’s been almost three weeks since he last saw her, but he remembers every word. Remembers the look on her face too, cold and withdrawn, clinical. She had no right to say those things to him. Well, maybe she did, just a little bit — but four beers deep gives him a righteous indignation. Five gives him that hot flicker of irritation in the pit of his stomach, the one that flares hotter and tighter until it’s the only thing he can remember of her, the way she makes him feel. The memory of her green eyes on him, cool and patient, grows distant. Her voice loses that edge of judgement — or was it pity? 

By the time the pretty blonde sidles up to him, a struck match smile and a purpose in the curl of her hand across his wrist, he’s long forgotten everything of Tessa but that fire. 

Another half-hour, and then that fades too.   
  


* * *

  
It’s really no different to the press events she used to do for the National Ballet, Tessa reminds herself, over and over again. 

The crowd of photographers she’s eyeing up through the window of her taxi, corralled in a holding area by the red carpet like animals in a pen, is only about five times as large as the ones the Ballet ever attracted. She’s only wearing a dress that probably costs double what she would have made in a year as a Principal, thankfully provided by Scott’s people because she sure as hell would not be able to cover the cost herself. And the man currently waiting a few metres away from her car, talking with his publicist and completely unaware of her arrival, is only her childhood sweetheart whom she’s now supposed to pretend to be in love with for the sake of a promise made a decade ago. 

No difference at all. 

She hadn’t felt nervous until now. The first day of the festival had been slow going, Marie-France wanting to wait until the evening’s tentpole premiere to “reveal” Tessa. Scott had been escorted off early in the day to give his opening statement at the welcome speech, and Tessa hadn’t seen him since. She hadn’t minded — it was easy to while away the time by herself, curled up in their hotel room with a book, venturing onto the balcony every so often to appreciate the view of the Falls. She’d even managed to sneak out to wander with the crowds of tourists along sidewalks slick with spray, peer over the railings down to where the Falls plunge into the basin below and recall the time she’d visited as a kid with her family on one of the few weekends she got off from the ballet school. The bored-looking photographers camped outside the hotel hadn’t bothered her; none of them took any notice of her without Scott or Marie-France. It had been nice, briefly, to have that anonymity. 

She knows it won’t last past the moment she steps out of this taxi and onto the red carpet.

She considers the possibility that she could simply back out of the whole thing right now. Scott hasn’t even noticed she’s arrived yet. She could ask the driver to turn around and take her straight back to the hotel, pack her things and go home without a word to him.

She’s not even sure if he would care. He hasn’t texted her since their conversation at The Rook and Raven a month ago, and she’s exchanged more words with his publicist than with him the entire day. Technically that _is_ what she asked him for — a professional separation, to be able to treat this whole thing like a job she has to carry out and nothing more. There’s a part of her that’s beginning to think this was all a terrible idea, wonders whether he’s finally realised it too. But she’s come all this way. She’s spent so much time getting ready, Jordan on video call to make her feel a little less stupid getting all dressed up in an empty hotel room. She may as well see this one event through.

Sucking in a breath, she tucks a few strands of hair back behind her ear, steels herself just like she would the moment before the curtain opened on every performance with the Ballet. 

She inhales — heart racing, frantic as a hummingbird’s wings against her ribcage and just as keen for an escape.

She exhales — remembers that split second, the moment of electricity where the entire company would breathe as one, and the nerves that punched through her veins could be the same as the ones that ran through the newest, fresh-faced apprentice to the corps de ballet, shivering in the wings.

And she steps out of the taxi. 

Curtain up. 

Showtime.  
  


* * *

  
Scott folds his arms across his chest, watching yet another photographer turn away from the red carpet with a frown. 

On a scale of one to ten, one being the time his older brother hosted a backyard cinema club and charged everyone ten bucks to get a chair to sit on, and ten being the Oscars that he’s never yet been invited to, the Niagara International Film Festival is pulling a solid four and a half. Even the curious tourists and the passers-by bribed into the red carpet crowd with offers of freebies are beginning to look bored.

“Too late now to turn back, you reckon?” he says lightly. “Tell you what, at least if it gets much worse we won’t have far to go to drown our sorrows.”

Marie-France is in the process of tapping out a text on her phone; she looks up with a frown, her lips pulling into a thin line. “Hm? What did you say?”

“Nothing, it was a joke. Stupid joke. Don’t worry about it.”

She gives him a discerning look, slips her phone into her coat pocket.

“Here, your tie...” she says, clicking her tongue between her teeth and stepping close. “Tch, who dressed you? Doesn’t know the difference between a Windsor knot and a half-Windsor. Shameful. On the red carpet of all places.”

Scott raises an eyebrow. “Me, Marie. That was me. I dress myself these days.”

“Hm, well.” His eyes are averted from hers, gaze fastened just over her shoulder — in her heels, she’s almost as tall as he is — but he can see her lips pull up into a smile, arched eyebrow tilt upwards. “It is just as well you have me here, then.”

Beyond Marie’s shoulder, cast members stroll down the carpet with a small amount of fuss, fielding autograph requests from a couple of diehard fans pushed up to the barriers. The crowd has filled out from when he and Marie arrived half an hour ago, but it’s still an underwhelming affair for what should be the hot-ticket event of the festival.

“Was that Tessa?” he says. “The person you were texting just now?”

“Patrice. He wanted to know what time I would be back for dinner tomorrow. It’s his turn to cook, you see. Heaven knows if it were up to me, we’d be eating fridge scraps. I am lucky my husband is more determined to keep us both healthy and fed.”

“Oh,” Scott mumbles. “That sounds nice.”

Marie-France gives him a sympathetic look as she finishes adjusting his tie and steps back. She places a hand on his arm, squeezes tight. “She’ll be here. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried—”

But his blatantly false protests are lost in a sudden ripple of noise from the small section of the crowd standing by the barriers at their end of the carpet, and Marie-France makes a pleased noise, patting him excitedly on the arm. 

In an instant, all of Scott’s worries about Tessa getting cold feet, about her leaving him in the lurch and driving straight back to Toronto, about her spilling all the details of their arrangement to the press, NDA be damned, and the little voice that says maybe he would miss her for more than her strategic significance to their plan — all of those disappear like smoke on the breeze.

He knows what he’ll see before he even turns; but that knowledge doesn’t prepare him in the least for the actual thing.

Turning on his heel, he sees a flash of cobalt blue appearing from the shadowy interior of a taxi, the pale curve of a grateful smile as she accepts the hand of the doorman to help her out. A moment later, Tessa Virtue emerges into the light, and Scott swears she brings all the colours under the sun with her.

She looks like something straight out of a dream. He almost pinches himself, actually, just to double check. 

Her dark hair is pinned up in a careful bun, a few delicate wisps curling around her face. A dress of deep, night-sky blue tucks in close at her waist, curving over her hips and thighs before flaring out into a sweep of midnight. Her shoulders are bare, and around her neck is hung a glittering lattice of jewels, silver like stardust against the pale expanse of her skin and the night-blue of her dress.

He’s never met anybody in the world like Tessa Virtue. 

Not at nine, not at sixteen, not at twenty-eight. 

The stars and the sky have been pulled to Earth to adorn her; and Scott thinks in that moment that if anyone could do it, it’d be Tessa.

She holds out her hand when she draws near to him, and he offers her his arm without even thinking about it.

“Are you ready?” she says, under her breath. “Sorry I took so long, the dress...”

“Don’t even worry about it,” he says — a miracle he has breath to speak, has strength left to keep him upright, smiling, talking. “You look — holy shit. You look incredible, Tess.”

He doesn’t even realise he’s used her nickname until her lips curve into a smile. Her fingers press warmly over the sleeve of his suit jacket, and she makes a small tilting motion with her head. “Let’s not keep them waiting, then.”

They progress slowly down the red carpet, stopping for Scott to sign autographs or answer a few questions. It’s not difficult to tell that Tessa’s appearance has piqued the interest of the crowd — every second question is the identity of the mysterious woman on his arm — and if Scott were thinking logically about things, he would be able to identify that too. But he’s not even paying attention to the crowd any more, or the rabble of photographers that shout his name as he walks along the carpet, Tessa’s arm in his. There could be twenty people, two hundred, two thousand. He wouldn’t notice any of them.

In some distant, far-off part of his brain, he’s vaguely aware of that important little footnote reminding him that none of this is real. Tessa’s hand is on his arm because it needs to be; the warmth of her touch is simple biology; the slight flush on her cheeks when she meets his eyes is makeup, or maybe she’s shy or nervous or cold or a hundred other things. The gentle siren call of her smile is all part of the play. She’s studied this, has trained her whole life to dazzle and entrance without saying a word.

But then she presses up close to him before a reporter’s camera, winds a hand around his waist and offers in a soft voice that they’ve known each other for years, were childhood friends long ago but only fell in love upon a recent reconnection, and he knows — _knows_ this is the story they’ve agreed, the one they’ve gone back and forth with Marie-France and Patrice on for weeks to strike the right balance between romantic and saccharine.

It doesn’t matter. He believes it when she looks up at him, her green eyes dazzling and clear, the bright lights of the red carpet scattering softness across the gentle, fond pull of her eyebrows, the soft pink bow of her lips. 

How, where, when she found it, he doesn’t know — but he knows she’ll see it reflected back in his starstruck gaze, unable to pull his eyes away from her for even a second.

And he knows the rest of the world will too.  
  


* * *

  
(In the darkness of the movie theatre later, thirty minutes into the feature film presentation that Scott has paid absolutely no attention to through no fault of its creators, she’ll place her hand over his on the armrest between their chairs, intertwine their fingers together so that he can feel the slight trembling of her hand still, the same way he could feel her trembling the whole way through the red carpet, even when she was smiling so brightly for the cameras that she drew every eye to her like a moth to a flame.

He won’t make a sound, but he’ll learn, over the next two hours, exactly what the shape of her hand feels like in his. He’ll know it so well that he could draw it from memory, the curve of her palm and the ridge of her knucklebone outlined as clear in his head as a cell on a film reel.

Holding hands with Tessa at twenty-eight is a world and a lifetime away from holding hands with Tessa at nine.)  
  


* * *

  
The wait between the end of the premiere and the moment they’re safely hidden back in their hotel is tortuous, made worse by the fact that Marie-France makes them hang around at the after-film drinks for at least an hour before she’s satisfied that they’ve conversed with the appropriate people.

Skiving off free booze and platters of upmarket finger food would be Scott’s M.O. on any normal evening. Tonight, he can’t focus on anything but the woman on his arm. He probably makes a complete fool of himself, all faltering sentences and trains of thought that don’t so much run away as dive headlong off a cliff. A cliff of midnight blue satin, glittering silver jewels, and green eyes that stop him in his tracks whenever they fall upon him.

He’s lucky that Tessa is a natural, able to charm the room as effectively as he cannot in his current mindset.

Lucky that she replied to his ridiculous letter in the first place, lucky that she showed up, gave him her weekend to sweep around in a fancy ballgown on a red carpet. Lucky that she’s even speaking to him, lucky that she’s _good_ at this. 

Too good, maybe.

He knows what to do with the Tessa he remembers. That girl of summers past was shy and gangly and made him feel like he was caught somewhere between her brother and her first boyfriend. He knew what to say after their first kiss, sweaty-palmed and her eyes big and wide in the darkness of his car, and he knew that he’d break her heart when he left, same way he knew she’d forget all about him in six months’ time.

He hasn’t the faintest fucking clue what to do with the Tessa in her blue dress and her jewels, the Tessa who carries herself like a prima ballerina, who makes him feel unsteady and off-balance, fumbling with his words while she dances circles around the entire assembly of producers and actors and directors and journalists. 

He’s almost grateful when that Tessa disappears.

It takes one in the morning to roll around, the two of them safely back at the hotel, having been escorted in the back entrance by Marie-France to avoid the mob of paparazzi out front. He’s taken the sofa for the night, which seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do at the time. Half an hour of tossing and turning later, a sizeable crick in his neck already, he wishes he’d just done the sensible thing and asked for a second room, optics be damned. They could have easily claimed they needed an adjoining room for Scott’s travelling wardrobe, or something. Marie-France would have come up with an excuse.

Across the way, if he listens carefully, he can hear the sound of Tessa’s breathing. She’d barely said a word to him since they returned to the hotel, slipping into the bathroom and then into bed with a quick goodnight and a blink-and-miss-it moment of eye contact.

At least she seems to be sleeping well now. Better than him, at any rate. 

He grits his teeth, shoves his pillow over his head and tries, for a brief few minutes, to ignore the fine antique carved armrest currently grinding against the base of his skull.

Then he gives up and pulls on his sneakers and the thick overcoat that Marie wouldn’t let him wear to the premiere, told him it ruined the line of his suit. Tessa’s still sleeping soundly by the time he lets himself out of the room; he gives a quick glance in her direction, sees the faint outline of her sleeping form, the smeared lights of the casino strip filtering in through the drawn curtains giving him just enough to see by.

He thinks he sees her shift slightly, hears a quiet mumble. Briefly, he wonders what she dreams about. It used to be winning a gold medal at the Olympics, dancing with the National Ballet, the kind of dreams that seemed far-fetched until you met her. Tessa dreamt with the certainty of knowing that the things she put her mind to would be a future reality — which was why her injury had always seemed to Scott to be profoundly unfair.

He wonders if she still dreams of the stage and the spotlight, or if, like him, such things have been consigned to painful memory.

He stands there in the doorway, one hand curled around the frame and one foot out of the door, until the ping of the elevator from down the hallway breaks him of his trance. With a quick shiver, he pushes the door closed behind him and heads along the dimmed corridor.

He’s stayed here a couple of times before, knows the way up. The doors are never locked, and it doesn’t take long before he’s out on the roof, breathing in the crisp, chill night air.

It’s an unremarkable rooftop: a cluster of plain, squat air vents and a locked storage crate, grubby stone parapet wall that comes up to Scott’s waist. The lights of the strip reflect off the puddles of rainwater that have collected across the concrete in recent days. Up this high, he can hear the wind howling straight off the edge of the Falls. The cold is bracing, and he’s glad for his coat, protecting him from the worst of the elements as he settles himself down on the parapet wall, propped against a large metal structure that he assumes is some sort of backup generator or air conditioning unit.

The pounding in his head subsides a little as he sits there, staring down across the still-busy streets.

From thirteen floors up, he picks out doormen standing at the entrance to the casinos, drunk revellers stumbling down the pavement, even a few families hurrying past the debauchery. He knows what the inside of every one of the casinos and clubs along this stretch of road looks like — could head down there right now and get in on the ease of a smile and the notoriety of his presence.

It would be so simple. Would be a kindness, even, to shove out the uneasy tension that Tessa’s presence brings and replace it with the smooth comfort of liquor.

He thought it would be a good idea to have someone in this whole endeavour who knew him the way he used to be before he got to Toronto and royally screwed himself. He thought that was sensible. Tessa was sensible — always, above anything else. She was the kind of kid who planned her whole life out before she’d even begun it. He knew that from the first day they started skating together, when she’d sat him down in the parking lot after practice and explained to him, with the greatest sincerity, that if they wanted to perform in the Ilderton Carnival they would need to be at least three times better than they currently were.

She’s made it abundantly clear that she sees this as nothing more than another task to complete. A box for her to check — _tick_ , lifelong debt repaid to childhood friend — and to be on her way.

She has no problem with the role she needs to play here.

So why is he the one stumbling over his sentences every time she so much as glances in his direction?

Why does he want to please her so damn bad that he’s up on a roof freezing his ass off in the middle of November, watching strangers tear down a strip that he would have owned six months ago?

Why — and here’s the one that Scott is afraid he knows the answer to already — did it stick under his skin to watch that thousand megawatt smile slip away into cold practicality as soon as they were out of sight of the press?

With a sigh, he stretches his legs out atop the parapet wall, closes his eyes briefly to enjoy the wind on his face.

It’s a fucking stupid idea, the whole thing. Whatever the hell they’ve started today, Scott has no idea where they’ll finish. But after everything, it’s the least he can do to try and make Marie and Patch happy by seeing it through.

“Scott—?”

The voice is so quiet that at first he thinks he imagined it.

Until he opens his eyes to see a very not-asleep, confused-looking Tessa standing in the doorway, bare feet pushed into a pair of sneakers and her hair strewn messily around her shoulders, still a little wavy from her bun.

“What are you doing?” she says, her voice thick and heavy. 

She can’t have been awake long — she still has that hazy, half-asleep look to her. And she’s still in her pyjamas, Scott realises, the same thin silk camisole and pants that she came out of the bathroom in, lavender rippled against her pale skin like the cusp of an ocean wave. 

That shouldn’t be as distracting as the blue dress and the necklace of stars that she was wearing on the red carpet, but somehow it is.

“I’m, uh — I needed to get some air,” he says. “Couldn’t sleep.”

She blinks at him. “So you came up to the roof?”

“Balcony’s being watched.”

“Oh,” she says, with a pause. Then: “That’s creepy. Does that always happen?”

“Most of the time,” he shrugs. “You get used to it.”

Tessa looks as though she would beg to differ. He doesn’t blame her; it was a weird thing for him to deal with at first too. He’d been prepared to give up his anonymity when he decided to become an actor, thought he understood the aspects of normal life that might be taken away from him. 

The autograph signing and the random encounters with fans on the street had been an easier pill to swallow than the paparazzi tailing him to his niece’s sixth birthday party, the stake-outs of his apartment day and night, the complete disregard for the fact that he might have signed up for this, but his family and his friends certainly did not.

He’s used to it in the sense that he’s resigned to it. But that’s not what Tessa wants to hear at two in the morning, a few hours left before they throw themselves into the fray all over again, so instead he offers her a tired smile, moves breezily on.

“How did you find me, anyway?”

Tessa folds her arms across her chest. “You always liked being up high,” she says. “At the Arena, remember? You’d steal the keys from your aunt and hide up on the roof to avoid ballet class.”

“Oh yeah.” He grins, a proper smile this time. “I let you up there once to spy on your sister and Danny. Thought for sure you’d rat me out and I’d be grounded for a month.”

“I have principles,” she says dryly. “And I enjoyed how productive class was without you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Tessa gives a snort of laughter, shaking her head, and it’s kind of the best thing he’s heard in a long time.

“You wanna come sit?” he says, gesturing to the wall next to him.

She raises an eyebrow. “On the edge of a thirteen-storey drop?”

“I won’t let you fall.”

It’s easier to talk to Tessa when they’re joking around, easier to treat her like an old friend; but every so often he’ll catch himself saying something that twists the whole conversation out from underneath them. He doesn’t blame her for the slightly awkward pause that follows — but he _is_ surprised when she comes up to the parapet wall next to him, leans against it.

Under the thin, reflected light of the strip below, he can see she’s shivering, hairs raised along her bare arms and up to the straps of her camisole.

“Here,” he says, shrugging off his thick coat and holding it out to her. 

There’s no easy way to rebuild a relationship that he set to crash and burn ten years ago, but if there’s anything that comes out of this whole crazy situation with Tessa, he hopes it’s that. He’d like to be able to talk to her again. As a friend, if nothing else. He misses being able to talk to her.

She looks a little surprised, but takes the coat from him without complaint, slipping it on and settling against the parapet wall.

If he glances up at her, he can see the light catch the pale highlights in her eyes, little splinters of jade that seem to soak up the reflected neon and artifice of the street below. His coat hangs large on her, and the wind sets it alive — the lavender silk of her camisole rippling too, riding up a little over her torso, her dark hair fluttering in the breeze, chin tipped up slightly, like if she pushed up onto her tiptoes now, she’d simply float away.

Scott decides that his life would be a whole lot easier if he didn’t notice these things about her. 

“How did you find today?” he says, clearing his throat.

She gives a little shrug. “Good. Kind of strange at first, but it felt natural pretty quickly. I didn’t have to think too much about it.”

“You _were_ a natural, Tess. Seriously. Charmed the pants off everyone on that red carpet. Marie had this giddy grin on her face the whole time, you should have seen her.”

“I thought it would be different,” Tessa says quietly, looking out across the darkness. “I used to have all these nightmares about getting on stage and completely forgetting all of my choreography, every single note of the music, every cue… or getting to opening position and realising I was in the wrong production. You know? Just an embarrassment. A packed house watching me and nothing to show to them. I thought it might be like that.”

Scott’s too afraid to ask her whether it was better or worse than she expected.

“But it was so easy,” she says, with a brief shake of her head. 

She sounds a little strange, something almost rueful in her voice.

“That’s good,” he says hesitantly. “Right? That’s a good thing. All of this might actually work out. Marie was right.”

Tessa’s head tilts towards him, and the look in her eyes raises all the hairs along his arms. “Sure, Scott,” she says, softly — too softly, the boundary lines of their arrangement bleeding like watercolour across the brushstrokes of her lips around his name. “That’s a good thing.”

It’s not a good thing. He knows that instantly.

It’s not good that she can apparently slip into the role of his childhood flame without a backwards glance. It’s not good that she’s being honest with him about all of this, that she’s opening up to him in however small a way. It’s extra specially not good that despite the fact she told him she’d never loved anyone in her whole life, she looked at him on the red carpet like she’d hang the moon and stars in the sky if he asked.

None of this is good, because it’s becoming abundantly clear to Scott that no matter what he thought he was leaving behind at age sixteen, his crush on Tessa Virtue has endured.

In the smallest, tiniest voice, he hears himself say “Excellent.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, please let me know what you thought, either in the comments below or over at [Tumblr](http://virtueoso.tumblr.com/ask) or [Twitter](http://twitter.com/virtueosos). I don't expect to be done with the next chapter until my exams are finished in September, but then again, I thought I wasn't going to be done with this chapter until after September either, so... I'll see you when I see you!
> 
> Thanks so much for reading!


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